Assessment of therapist adherence (how closely did the therapist follow the manual guidelines, what interventions were actually delivered to the participant) and competence (how skillfully did the therapist deliver the treatment) in clinical trials of behavioral treatments based on session tapes is generally done at two separate times, by two different types of raters, and for two highly different purposes:

The Addiction Severity Index - Lite version (ASI-Lite) is a shortened version of the Addiction Severity Index (ASI). The ASI is a semi-structured instrument used in face-to-face interviews conducted by clinicians, researchers or trained technicians. The ASI covers the following areas: medical, employment/support, drug and alcohol use, legal, family/social, and psychiatric. The ASI obtains lifetime information about problem behaviors, as well as problems within the previous 30 days. The ASI-Lite contains 22 fewer questions than the ASI, and omits items relating to severity ratings, and a family history grid. It can be administered in approximately 30 minutes.

The ARCI is a standardized questionnaire used for assessing subjective effects of psychoactive drugs that was developed in the early 1960s at the National Institute of Mental Health Addiction Research Center. Using the "private language of users," the ARCI was developed to address the problem of the discrepancy of observer/user terminology by constructing the items from empirically validated, solicited responses of former addicts under the influence of various drugs. This self-report inventory was developed from the use of "sentence completion" and other association techniques on male subjects under drug and no-drug conditions. In addition to demonstrated "drug-sensitive" questions, the final form of the inventory (550 "true-false" items) also contains items which were thought to delineate to some extent schizoid and "psychopathic" characteristics. Initial use indicated that the inventory was effective in differentiating various subjective effects of drugs and in discriminating some similarities and differences of naturally occurring and experimentally induced behavioral abnormalities. A 49-item short form has also been developed.

This scale is a 40-item measure that was used in the NIDA Cocaine/Psychotherapy Study to evaluate mediators of outcome in drug counseling. Items are based on the 12-step approach to recovery ("I know that recovery from addiction is a lifelong process," "When I experience craving, I go to a 12- step meeting," "I haven't gotten around to getting a sponsor," "I rely on my higher power to help me stay clean." The internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha) of the total of the 40-items was found to be 0.82 using baseline data from the main clinical trial in the Cocaine/Psychotherapy Study.

This assessment includes physical, sexual and emotional abuse items. In each domain the participant is asked to report: lifetime occurrence (YES/NO); lifetime frequency (4-point scale from once to regularly); need for medical treatment (YES/NO); use of medical treatment (YES/NO); length of time since last occurrence; occurrence with main partner (YES/NO); occurrence with other than main partner (YES/NO); and past 3 month frequency (on a 1 – 6 scale of daily to no occurrence). Participants are also asked age of first sexual abuse and description of perpetrator (e.g. different family members, strangers, etc.). It has been shown that abuse is positively associated with sexual risk behavior.